Former President Barack Obama is working with Democratic leaders to develop strategies to rebuild the party in the wake of the crushing electoral losses it suffered in 2016 and in previous cycles during his presidency.

The former president has held several meetings with Democratic members of Congress in both his West End office and via phone since he handed the presidency over to President Donald Trump in January, according to a Sunday report in The Hill. Obama has also engaged in several conversations with newly elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez as the latter seeks to address the party’s disarray.

“Hey man, it’s only the future of the world in your hands,” Obama joked with Perez, a DNC aide told The Hill. That aide also said that Obama’s phone calls with Perez constituted regular “check-ins.”

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A source The Hill describes as “close to the former president” has been offering himself to these party leaders as “an available resource,” while another source claimed that Obama “doesn’t want the focus to be on him” and “doesn’t want to be out in front.”

Eddie Zipperer, an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College, told LifeZette in an email that the Democratic Party won’t have a successful future if it allows itself to become the “party of Obama’s substantial coattails.”

“I don’t know why the Democrats continue to think their party and policies are popular. Obama is popular. The Democrat party is not. I guess he let the Democrats hang out with him, and it went to their heads,” Zipperer said.

While many of Obama’s conversations with Democratic lawmakers and leaders focused on policy issues, other exchanges centered on how best to craft an outline for the party’s future as it regroups from its 2016 losses. The former president is also planning to hit the campaign trail to boost Democratic hopefuls in their quests for office.

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“He doesn’t want to be president or the voice of the Democratic Party,” one of Obama’s former aides told The Hill. “But he’ll definitely be there to guide folks along the way.”

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Obama —who told CNN’s David Axelrod back in late December 2016 that he was “confident” he would have “mobilized the American people to rally behind” him against Trump if he could have run for a third term — expressed his confidence in the power of his “hope and change” platform.

“I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I — if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Obama had said. “I know that in conversations that I’ve had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one.”

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The Democratic Party suffered catastrophic losses during Obama’s eight years in office. Since the 2008 presidential election, Democrats have suffered a net loss of 1,042 federal, state and local seats — not to mention losing the 2016 presidential election and majorities in the House and the Senate.

“The Democratic Party is the party of Obama’s substantial coattails. Those coattails were all they had going for them. Just look what happened in 2010, 2014, 2016, and all the special elections of late,” Zipperer said. “The Democrats are the party of coastal elites, but they can’t figure that out because they are coastal elites. It’s like fish. Fish don’t know there’s water. To them, that’s just what the world looks like.”

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Since their 2016 losses across the board, Democrats have struggled to rally around a new message and chart a fresh course.

Democratic members of Congress have failed to agree over whether or not House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should leave her leadership position and hand the reins over to the younger generation — especially after the GOP successfully tied the Democratic candidate in the Georgia 6th District’s special election to Pelosi.

To make matters even worse, the DNC experienced its worst May of fundraising since 2003, according to Federal Election Commission data, reflecting the party’s struggles to drum up enough support during its ongoing messaging crisis. But instead of focusing intensely on crafting a strong economic message to take to middle-class Americans who supported Trump’s “America first” platform to “make America great again,” Democratic congress members and leaders have spent a huge chunk of time bashing Trump and heading the so-called “Resistance.”

“They think attacking the president is the solution to their problems, but it isn’t,” Zipperer said. “It’s just a way to make more people roll their eyes and tune them out.”